


Don’t Burn Out on Me

by mayflowers07



Series: i can be the one you call [3]
Category: Hermitcraft RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Burn Out, Dadsuma, Dissociation, Exhaustion, Found Family, Gen, Hermits as a family, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Overworking, Platonic Cuddling, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, So be warned, Tango is really going through it in this one, Team ZIT, a Touch of imposter syndrome, and he also does something to physically hurt himself, because I’m projecting, because he’s not taking care of himself, but he is still self harming, but i cant help it i love him, its not super graphic, let the homies cuddle he deserves it, like he’s not cutting or anything, no beta we die like HEP in the turf war, xisuma is such a dad in all my stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28274280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayflowers07/pseuds/mayflowers07
Summary: Tango Tek always gave his all to every project, no matter how big or small. His work on the server was his pride and joy. And season seven, with Decked Out, and his base, and all of the other work he had been doing was no exception. And sure, maybe it was a bit tiring and maybe he had a habit of overworking himself, but it had never really gotten too bad.Until Tango begins feeling like everything is falling apart.Until Tango starts losing control of himself.Until Tango has to call on his fellow Hermits for help before things get ugly.(Part of a series, but you don’t need to read the other parts, you can read this one completely separately from the others)
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s), They’re all one big family, and team zit are best friends, impulseSV & Tango Tek & Zedaph (Video Blogging RPF)
Series: i can be the one you call [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2051148
Comments: 37
Kudos: 229





	Don’t Burn Out on Me

**Author's Note:**

> I already said it in the tags but I’ll say it again- the self-harm in this fic is not super graphic except for a specific point where there is a moment of physical self harm. But the other stuff that isn’t as graphic is still self-harm. Neglecting your health, including your mental health, by not eating, not sleeping, not taking care of yourself, and being super mentally negative towards yourself is still self-harm. If any of that is at all triggering towards you, I would ask you to reconsider reading this fic.
> 
> Also in case you haven’t read the other fics, let me just really quickly explain the concept this series is based off of: in Hermitcraft there is a code phrase Xisuma introduced years ago- blue creeper. If anyone says the phrase, it means something is seriously wrong and that everything has to be stopped to deal with whoever said it. It’s a way to ensure that even though the Hermits all prank each other, fight in wars, and have conflicts, it stays friendly and nothing gets taken too far. It also acts as an emergency sos when someone is in immediate danger.

Tango Tek didn’t do anything in halves. If he started a project and was really dedicated to it, then that project was going to be the best thing he had ever built- even if it was the last thing he did.

Take Decked Out for instance. That game was so near to Tango’s heart, it may as well have been his child. He poured his blood, sweat, and tears into Decked Out. And it sure was rewarding to see how much the other Hermit’s liked the game. All of the late nights spent designing puzzles and wrangling ravagers became worth it when he would see the smile on his friends’ faces after they got new artifacts or talked about how fun navigating the maze was.

Although going all in on every project he did also had its downfalls. Even Tango could admit that it was hard to keep going some days when he put his entire heart and soul into something he created, draining himself in the process. The rewards were always so great, but the risks could send him spiraling in an instant.

And again, there was one specific time with Decked Out that was the perfect example of this.

… 

To be fair, the day hadn’t been too spectacular to begin with. 

Tango had woken up at the way-too-early hour of five in the morning. It hadn’t been his intention to get up before the sun even rose, but for some reason that was probably anxiety related, he hadn’t been able to sleep all night except for short bursts of a few minutes at a time. So when five am rolled around, he found himself unable to get back to sleep. After several minutes of just staring at the ceiling, the man was forced to admit his insomnia had won out and that he may as well get up and start his day.

This was also particularly bad, because he had only gone to sleep four hours earlier that night and had barely slept at all the nights prior. In his defence, it had been a very busy week- almost overwhelmingly so. He had several jobs to work with the Boomers, shops to restock, meetings to attend to, and of course, Decked Out to run. Because of the overload of work, Tango had been cutting back further and further on sleeping, eating, hygiene, and spending time with friends.

(He knew that Zedaph and Impulse were getting worried about him. He had turned down any invites to hang out with his fellow Hermits, mostly the other members of Team ZIT, for two weeks. Based on his best friends’ whispers and concerned glances whenever they saw him at meetings or in busy districts face-to-face with the dark circles under his eyes and constant yawning, they knew he was pushing himself past his limits, but he was too busy to care.)

All of that was why the particular day at hand started at the crack of dawn with Tango mumbling exhausted complaints under his breath as he stumbled around his house trying to get dressed; ‘trying’ being the key word. He was so tired that he put his shirt on backwards and almost forgot to put socks on before his shoes. His eyes felt heavy, like with one blink he would never open them again. Once at least semi-put together, he opted to skip breakfast despite the pangs in his stomach in order to get a head start on Decked Out. Nothing needed to get done in the game, but his nerves insisted that he check it several times a day to make sure everything was running perfectly.

Before he left his base, he also made sure to grab his communicator from his bedside table. A quick glance at the screen showed the several group chats and private messages from other Hermits he’d been ignoring or barely responding beyond a yes or a no to. He grimaced, quickly closed the messages, shoved the communicator on his arm, and took off somewhat shakily into the sky.

The flight over was at least pleasant. That early, no other Hermits were in the major areas, so Tango was just left alone with his thoughts as he soared over sunrise-lit biomes. Which wasn't necessarily a good thing, since the past week his thoughts tended to bounce around rapidly like rubber balls and remind him in panic of ‘how he had so much left to do so much work nothing was going right he had to fix everything everything was failing him oh no.’

… so maybe the flight wasn’t pleasant per se. But at least the view was nice.

Once touched down in front of the familiar ravager-shaped building housing his game, Tango sighed. The day had just started and already, his back and neck muscles felt tight and sore and a sharp headache pressed against his temples. There was no time to rest though, so he considered later buying a healing potion to chug down as both a cure for his aching and a poor man’s substitute for the lunch he would probably skip out on.

Until then, the pain would have to wait.

Tango stretched his arms out above his head for a few seconds, feeling the deep pulling on his sore back, then trudged forward into the dark, ambient lighting of his own game.

To test it out and make sure everything was working as it should, Tango did a quick run through of Decked Out, purposely not grabbing any loot and instead seeking out any redstone components or trickier puzzles to assure that when another Hermit on an actual run found them, they’d work like they were intended.

And around eight in the morning, that is exactly where Tango found an issue, because a certain redstone door wasn’t opening. It was a very simple set up: you hit a button hidden under some plants in a nearby garden area, and the iron door across from it should have opened to reveal a bonus room with a hidden chest in it. 

The redstone work in it was easy, especially compared to some of the more complex contraptions Tango had built throughout the years. So it shocked Tango how deflated seeing that simple little mistake made him feel. His shoulders were tons heavier, and just the thought of having to fix the mechanism, even though it would probably take only minutes of his time, felt like climbing up Mount Everest. Disgruntled by the small incident, Tango took apart the walls of the dark moody room around the door to see what needed to be fixed. 

Now, Tango Tek was no fool. He had been working with redstone for years and was fairly confident in his own abilities in it too. So when he stared at the mess of sticky pistons, slime blocks, redstone trails, and other components and could confidently say he had no idea what on earth was wrong with the thing and what he was doing, that probably should have been a sign he needed a break.

It was easy though! He just had to check the… or maybe depower… or was it better to… wait, how did he… what was… what?

It was like his head was filled with honey he was tiredly trying to sludge through. Tango saw the blocks. He knew that he should know what to do next. But his brain just couldn’t process what he was seeing. It left him just staring blankly at all of the mechanisms, not being able to put together what the answer to this insurmountable problem would be.

Of course, his stupid headache wasn’t helping the situation at all. The pain was a constant buzz that was getting worse by the minute and left him squinting and blinking rapidly at the wall of redstone components. Even just standing and trying to puzzle through the mush in his brain was exhausting. His eyelids felt heavier than ever, he had to fight back a yawn every few minutes, and his feet hurt from just the short amount of time he had been standing around.

In fact, his feet hurt so much he decided to sit while he worked. Tango stumbled a bit as he lowered himself onto the cool stone floor of Decked Out. He almost moaned at the relief felt in his taut muscles once he was seated. It was there in front of the stupid redstone where Tango tried to make his brain comprehend what he needed to fix.

But he just couldn’t. Nothing about the machine made sense. Which shouldn’t have been the case. I mean, for Void’s sake, Tango had designed the thing! So why couldn’t he figure out how to fix a simple iron door? 

Was Decked Out, all of the work he had poured into it, really that useless considering he couldn’t even figure out the easiest parts of it? 

Was he actually so stupid that he even his own redstone was too complex for him?

Was everything he had done up until then a fluke? A bunch of luck that happened to be strung together to make him look and feel like he knew what he was doing?

Was Tango failing at the most important parts of his life?

It was actually his headache that grounded him and managed to bring him out of his own spiraling thoughts. He groaned deeply at the pounding around his skull. His neck and head hurt way worse than before, like a vice grip was tightening around his temples and neck muscles. Tango blinked sluggishly and slowly came back to his body, feeling the unforgiving cold stone under him. He realized that he had been sitting on the floor and dissociating while staring at the redstone components in the wall for some time, though how long he couldn’t exactly say.

The man lethargically lifted up his wrist to check his communicator for the time, though the bright screen of the device compared to the darkness of the room he had been sitting in made him wince, pain flaring up right behind his eyes. 

There were several notifications from the group chat that Tango promptly ignored, as well as one each from Impulse, Zedaph, and Bdubs. He also ignored those and grew uncharacteristically irritated at the thought of having to respond to the texts. Just another chore to do in his forever growing list.

Though he quickly forgot his discontent at the sight of the time.

It was 2:28 in the afternoon.

Tango’s jaw dropped. For a moment, all he could do was sputter incoherently at the sight of the black numbers on the screen. What had felt like barely minutes spaced out in front of the redstone had actually been almost six hours.

He had wasted hours and hours doing nothing.

Time he could’ve spent fixing builds or shopping for materials or grinding in farms or literally anything productive.

Tango pressed his closed fists hard against his eyes, trying to alleviate the pain but also trying to make sense of his own jumbled storm of thoughts. Red filled his vision.

Hours and hours.

Time that at the beginning of the season, would have been used so much more productively, but now he was slipping up and failing and losing control over everything.

Tango was shaking. He felt like throwing up, his stomach in tangled knots. He pushed his hands even harder against his closed eyelids, overcome with a deep urge to keep pushing until his fingers reached inside so he could claw at his own useless brain.

Hours and hours.

God, he was such a screw up! His projects were failing- he was failing- and instead of fixing his own disgusting mistakes, he was daydreaming. Like a freaking child. Like someone unworthy of all of his past success.

Tango was so angry with himself. He pushed himself up from the floor and began pacing the small grey room, breathing heavily like he had run a marathon. He just wanted to hit something, break something, scream or cry or laugh or hurt at everything he was doing wrong.

Hours and hours.

Because that was the nitty gritty of it. Everything he had done was wrong. Anything right had to have been a mistake. He was an imposter, a fake, a failure, a disappointment to the entire server, to all his friends!

Tango was just drowning, a million bad thoughts a mile beating into him all at once. His head hurt from thinking and his chest hurt from his beating heart and his lungs hurt from his breathing and his legs hurt from pacing and his eyes hurt from his fists and his soul hurt from the knowledge that he didn’t deserve any of the success he had earned.

He didn’t deserve any of it.

He didn’t deserve any of it.

He Didn’t Deserve Any Of It.

He Didn’t Deserve Any Of It..

He DidN’t DEseRvE AnY Of IT.

HE DIDN’T DESERVE ANY OF IT.

THE ONLY THING HE DESERVED WAS TO HURT!!!

With a guttural scream of raw rage and fear and exhaustion, Tango couldn’t take it anymore. He took the fists from his face and punched the right one as hard as he physically could with all of his built-up emotional issues into the stone wall of the room.

Pain exploded across his knuckles. The ache from the extremely forceful impact traveled all the way up his forearm, like someone was dragging a knife through his skin and against his bones. 

For a second, Tango just stood there panting hard, knuckles still against the stone- long enough for blood to begin dripping off of his hand and onto the wall from where he split his knuckles open.

Then the shock wore off, and he realized what he had just done.

And boy, did it hurt.

“Oh no,” Tango whispered to himself. He tried to gingerly move his swollen, red hand away from the wall and flex his fingers, but the pain deep in his bones made him gasp and instead hold the probably broken appendage protectively to his chest.

What was he doing? 

He had been so angry that the need to hurt, to feel anything that wasn't misery had overwhelmed him, and he couldn’t handle it. All of the tiredness he had felt before, it had been too much. So in a moment of anger he had-

The realization that came to Tango’s mind made him sob with his next breath and feel pressure building up behind his eyes: in a moment of anger, he had self-harmed by punching the wall.

Tango wasn’t doing okay.

In fact, if he had to guess, he didn't think he had been okay for quite a while. 

The isolation of not only the dull, chilled grey stone room- but also of the past two weeks he had spent pretty much alone and working himself to death- suddenly felt too much. He was hungry, he was tired, his arm hurt real bad, and most of all, he just wanted his friends.

So Tango raised his broken, shaking hand with blood smeared between the fingers in front of him to pull up the communicator on his wrist. With his other hand, he began to type in the group chat.

…

TangoTek: Blue creeper

… 

The instant response that came after the emergency code was enough to put at least a weak smile on his face, seeing everyone come through so quickly.

… 

Grian: Oh shoot what’s wrong

ZombieCleo: woah what’s up what do you need right now?

Docm77: Where are you? 

Cubfan135: I’m gonna go message X and let him

Iskall85: Oh no it’s Tango someone should tell Impulse and Zedaph too

BdoubleO100: already on it dude. Tango whatever you need, you’re gonna be okay

XisumaVoid: Tango, what’s wrong?

ImpulseSV: Tango! What happened dude where are you

Zedaph: oh no oh no are you okay??

… 

With a sigh, Tango moved to lean against a wall, too tired to stand fully while he typed out his response.

… 

TangoTek: I think a lot of things are wrong and i don't know how to fix any of them

XisumaVoid: That’s okay, we are all here to help you with anything you need.

XisumaVoid: But are you in immediate danger right now? Do you need medical help?

TangoTek: well I’m pretty sure I broke my hand

Docm77: damn why does this keep happening to us

MumboJumbo: at least this time I’m fairly sure it wasn't my fault

… 

Even though he was an emotional wreck, Tango couldn't help but laugh at the messages.

… 

XisumaVoid: Okay, I’m bringing healing potions then. I assume you’re in Decked Out?

TangoTek: yeah

XisumaVoid: I’m flying over there right now. Zedaph and Impulse, are you coming too?

Zedaph: Oh I started flying as soon as I saw the message I’m in the air right now

ImpulseSV: same I just left my base

XisumaVoid: It’s gonna be okay Tango. A broken hand can be dealt with.

… 

But it was so much more than just a broken arm. And Tango knew he needed to explain that as well. 

… 

TangoTek: yeah but X?

XisumaVoid: Yes?

TangoTek: I broke my hand on purpose

… 

The group chat was silent for a moment. The tears that were pressing against his eyes finally fell. He sniffled and rubbed his sleeve against his wet cheeks, only for more tears to fall down right after.

… 

ImpulseSV: oh buddy…

Zedaph: Tango I’m so sorry we’re almost there please hold on 

XisumaVoid: We are so close Tango. Please just sit tight and keep messaging the group chat for us.

Rendog: oh my god 

StressMonster100: babe it’s gonna be okay

GoodTimesWithScar: that’s a lot to deal with

JoeHills: tango, are you going to hurt yourself again? Are you okay being alone until they get there

TangoTek: I don’t think I’m gonna do it again

TangoTek: i was just so tired and this stupid door broke and I couldnt fix it and i felt so defeated and like such a screw up i couldn’t take it so i punched a wall and now my hand really hurts and I’m crying real hard and I’m hungry and tired and my head hurts

TangoTek: im sorry

ImpulseSV: No no dude if anyone should be sorry it’s us. We knew you’ve been pushing yourself hard recently and that you were going to burn out eventually. We should have stepped in sooner

Zedaph: Tango we all love you so much. You’re our family we’re a team. We’re going to help you through this buddy I promise you

XisumaVoid: We all just met up in front of Decked Out, the three of us are coming in Tango. It’s going to be okay.

… 

And it was okay. 

It was okay when the three of them found him in the room, and Zedaph and Impulse pulled him in for the most weepy Team ZIT group hug ever, with all three of them crying and sobbing out apologies to one another.

It was okay when Xisuma bandaged Tango’s hand and made sure he drank a healing potion. While doing so all of his problems came rushing out of him in one long rant that left him breathless, bone-tired, and sandwiched in another hug, this time with Xisuma joining and wrapping his arms protectively around his hurt Hermit.

It was okay when Xisuma left him in the capable hands of his best friends, who took him home, made sure he took a long hot bath, ate a wonderfully cooked dinner that was much more filling than anything he had eaten for days, knew through reassurance that even if he couldn't get his builds to perfect he was more than enough and everyone would love him regardless, and slept for at least ten hours.

It was okay when he gratefully took a week off of any work on the server and spent that whole week just hanging out with Impulse and Zedaph, relaxing and catching up on self-care he had been neglecting for so long.

It was okay when Xisuma was there in the morning to remind Tango that he should talk to someone next time he felt overwhelmed before it got as bad as it did, and that the admin’s door was always open, along with all of the other Hermits who spent that week sending Tango a slew of supportive messages saying that he could always count on them when he needed, even if it was just to chat. 

And that night, as Tango lay cuddled between Zedaph and Impulse on his bed, both of his best friends snuggled close to him while being wary of his injured arm, Tango knew right before he fell asleep that he wasn’t necessarily fixed. He still had bad habits to work on, insecurities to deal with, and negative thoughts to unlearn. But by reaching out for help, he was on the right path to dealing with those issues.

So for the moment, in the peaceful, quiet darkness with his head tucked into Impulse’s chest and Zedaph’s arms wrapped around him, it was all okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, can you tell I was really projecting in this one? Honestly this one really hit me the most, because I really do like Tango a lot and I deal with burn out a lot. So I hope maybe some of you could find some solace in this fic too.
> 
> Also that last bit about Tango’s issues not being fixed by the end was very important to me. The road to recovery isn’t simple, and ingrained habits can’t be broken just because of one week of self-care and some hugs. But Tango is doing the right thing by taking those first steps, and for the moment that is enough.
> 
> Next one up: Iskall! It’s definitely a doozy so I’m excited to show y’all it when I’m done, but it’s also a fair bit darker then the others. I can’t wait to continue torturing my favourite characters lol. If you have any other ideas about this AU, please let me know in the comments! I can’t guarantee I’ll write them all, but I still love to see what else people have come up with.


End file.
